Radiating grandeur, Patten milked his adoring audience
HOW they tittered with the drollery of it all in the Lords last night as former Foreign Office schmoozer Lord Kerr concluded his arguments.
At Kerr’s behest, the unelected House threw what it intends to be a spanner in the Brexit works.
Ho, ho, ho, they went. We’ve got parliamentary jobs for life and no one can get rid of us! So let us embugger the grubby populace’s desire to break from Brussels.
Their recipe? Take Amendment This to Bill That, add a few ounces of collusion between exSir Humphrys and Blairites, plus a pinch of curry powder of upperclass sneering and, Bob’s your Baron: one vast democratic referendum vote imperilled.
Why do we tolerate these diseasing old fleas?
His lordship Kerr, brahmin des brahmins, whose cigarettey rasp and curlicued sentences testify to a life at ginny diplomatic soirees, is one of those Crossbenchers whose loyalty is to the Establishment party. Lord Kerr’s Whip is the System. The status quo. The Eurocentric etat.
The tragi- comic thing is that this most snooty of Euro-fanatics, back in his days as an official, wrote the small-print Article 50 under which we are quitting the European Empire. Kerr must daily inspect his writing hand and curse its very sinews for ever penning that part of the Lisbon Treaty. He and his mates must blithely have presumed no one would ever use it.
Hence, perhaps, his unyielding opposition to Brexit. If he can not exactly block it, he hopes to dilute it to the weakness of overwatered communion wine.
You thought, after Syria and Salisbury and Labour’s antiSemitism row and the thriving economy, that the remainers had finally conceded that they lost the EU referendum? Wrong. Like spring brambles, they were merely lurking unseen. Lord Kerr’s amendment told the Government’s Brexit negotiators to try to maintain a customs union with the EU. It could well banjax them.
The wording of the amendment was, said Eurosceptic Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab), so vague as to be mischievous. Like others who spoke up for Brexit, Lord Howarth was heckled by the quavering ancients of the EU regime.
Lord Patten of Barnes (Chris Patten, former EU Commissioner and much else) helped to propose the amendment. Drawling, dropping words at little more than one syllable per second, slowly flexing his eyebrows and radiating grandeur, he occasionally paused in his senior common room mockery of Brexit. Here was a papery-voiced afterdinner speaker milking his adoring audience’s laughter.
How disdainfully M’lud Patten regarded today’s Government ministers. How wearily he told the House – though really he was addressing the lower school of the plebby electorate – that statesmanship and its trade agreements were complicated beyond the ken of other folk. His Maundy Thursday had been ruined by having to read some paperwork surrounding this Bill. He did not imagine leaving the EU Customs Union could possibly bring rewards. ‘Absurd. For the birds.’
‘I have a degree of expertise in this area,’ he croaked. Pause. ‘I know that expertise is a dangerous thing in the present climate.’ Beside Lord Kerr, former Cabinet Secretary Lord O’Donnell chuckled in a clever way.
How old many of the lines felt: digs against David Davis and Liam Fox that MPs stopped using months ago. Lord Bilimoria, a groin-achingly pompous Crossbencher, said it was ‘our job as a Parliament to do damage limitation’ on Brexit.
LABOUR frontbencher Lady Hayter, hoping to illustrate the threat she felt Brexit posed to trade, said: ‘Folkestone would look more like stone than folks’. Oh dear.
Tory Viscount ridley took a tremendous tilt at the remainers but was torpedoed by pro-EU Lord Hannay, who was sporting a black eye (no surprise, that).
This House of Political Has-Beens naturally voted heavily for the Kerr amendment. But the words of Eurosceptic Lord Forsyth (Con) echoed long. He detected a ‘carefully orchestrated attempt to stop Brexit – a campaign that is pitting the peers against the people’.